Return To Auschwitz 40 Years Later, Survivors Relive The Holocaust

January 28, 1985|By Michael T. Kaufman, The New York Times

OSWIECIM, POLAND — Eva Kor, from Terre Haute, Ind., and her sister, Miriam Czaigher, from Ashkelon, Israel, stood Sunday morning at the railroad ramp at Auschwitz where in 1944 Dr. Joseph Mengele, chief physician at the Nazi death camp, separated them as 10-year-olds from their mother.

They were then added to the group of Jewish twins and dwarfs upon whom the doctor expe-ri-mented.

The sisters were among some 180 of Mengele`s twin subjects who survived his painful and often lethal ``medical experiments`` long enough to be freed when this largest of the Nazi death camps was liberated by Soviet soldiers 40 years ago Sunday.

They and six others, all survivors of pairs of twins used here as guinea pigs, came to Auschwitz for many private reasons. But they shared in dramatizing an appeal for the capture and prosecution of Mengele, the most notorious of Nazi war criminals to have gone unjudged and unpunished. He is believed to be still at large in South America.

A light snow fell at times Sunday and the paths between the barbed wire were muddy. The eight survivors, 30 of their accompanying relatives and friends, and 17 camera crews from the United States and Europe who swarmed around the visitors, dominated a landscape that was otherwise still, silent and desolate.

Kor, who helped organize the visit as a prelude to a tribunal of Mengele`s crimes to be held in Jerusalem next month, held her sister`s hand and tried, as all the survivors tried, to explain why exactly they had come to relive their torment and bear witness.

``Basically, I am coming to this place because this is the beginning of the end. My children asked me so often what happened. I do not have the answers. My biggest problem is that I never said goodbye to my mother.``

She explained that at the ramp where she and her twin were culled for experiments, her mother, with other women and all other children, were selected by Mengele for the crematorium.

During the years of his experiments, the 3,000 twin children he worked on were the only living children in the camp; the others, those not twins, were led to the gas chambers when they arrived.

Others in the group, which came from the United States and Israel, talked of other reasons. Marc Berkowitz, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and for a while acted as Mengele`s messenger, said he hoped ``to find the child I was before this happened.``

At one point he rushed to the barbed wire. He grasped it and said: ``Look, it no longer kills to do this. No longer can you be killed for throwing a piece of bread to your sister on the other side.``

His sister also survived and now lives in the United States, but he explained that she did not wish to come or to ``say anything to a world she feels ignored us when we were orphaned and suffering.``

As the group went to visit the places where their arms were tattooed on arrival and the places where the girls` and boys` barracks once stood, and where they lined up for roll call, Menasche Laurenci, one of the twins from Israel, conceded, ``It is very very hard to explain what one feels.``

At one point a group of 12 Polish high-school students walked along a path behind a wooden cross repeating the Lord`s Prayer. The groups did not acknowledge each other. Elsewhere, Elie Wiesel, the writer who spent his 15th and 16th years as an inmate here, described how he, too, feels awed and inarticulate here despite his life work of considering and revealing the Nazi crime.

The writer was brought here by Peter Jennings, the ABC News anchor, to describe the camp for a program on the anniversary of its liberation. When a Western correspondent, whose aunts and uncles died here, mentioned how hard it was for him to grasp more than the quantitative aspects of this killing ground where 4 million people were put to death as victims of technological barbarism, Wiesel sympathized.

``What I see, I cannot put into words either,`` said the writer and lecturer. ``I see what I saw then. I see all those people, but alive.`` He said that on an earlier visit, when he stood at the crumbling crematorium, he felt a strong need to say something, but he did not know what. ``Kaddish seemed too elegant,`` he said. ``I felt something more raw was needed and I found myself repeating Shma Yisroel (`Hear O Israel`) like a primitive cry, repeating it over and over.``

The twins and their relatives and friends conducted many ceremonies throughout the day, often arguing about where exactly certain events took place, as if they were trying to meld individual 40-year-old memories and traumas into a common experience.

They and some of their children lit six memorial candles for the 6 million Jews who died at ther hands of the Nazis, 3 million of them in this camp. Joined by two members of the Israeli Parliament, Dov Shilanski, a survivor of Dachau, and Shevach Weiss, the group sang Hatikvah. They laid flowers and at the crematorium the group offered prayers.